For the past several weeks, my Visual Studio (VS) / Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been freezing more and more. It started with file comparisons, moved to synchronizations, progressed to numerous other functionality,and eventually reached the point where I could not even submit any code changes. I uninstalled/reinstalled Visual Studio multiple times, and tried all kinds of other things to know avail. I eventually stumbled across the root cause. And, for as much grief that the TFS lock ups have caused me, the solution turned out to be fairly trivial!

After poking around in numerous file and registry locations, I eventually stumbled across the UISettings.config file, located in the following folder:

C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\6.0\Cache

As it turns out, that file contains the screen location of various TFS windows, and simply deleting that file seems to have resolved most if not all of my VS / TFS issues! Looking at the file contents, it appears that the file stores window locations for TFS windows, and their locations were simply off the screen. Since the windows were not set to appear on the taskbar, I had no idea the windows were open and thought TFS was either not opening them (if non-modal) or locking up (if modal).

I suspect that the coordinates became garbled because I almost always have multiple Visual Studios open, and use several different muti-display arrangements for my laptop. At work, I use several different docking stations that have different monitor arrangements. At home, I sometime use just the laptop, and sometimes plug in an extra monitor to get a bit more desktop real estate. I typically only restart the pc when forced to for udates, and often leave one or more Visual Studios open for extended periods of time. I think it's time to make a desktop shortcut to a batch file that will delete the UISettings.config.